


the arsonist's lullaby

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-24 07:04:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12007566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: You can't run away from your problems, but you can try. Seifer/Quistis, and the monstrous things within. NSFW.





	the arsonist's lullaby

 

 

He’s using her. He knows it, she knows it, they both know it and do exactly  _ shit  _ about it. They scream at each other, they fight (literally, figuratively, he doesn’t fucking know, only that he’s got more bruises and nail marks than sense), they fuck, they repeat the vicious cycle over and over and over again. 

Maybe she’s using him. They put all the hotel rooms on her card, don’t they? She buys the room service, the wine that neither of them drink, the condoms. She buys everything, and about all she doesn’t do is shove a wad of bills in his hand at the end of the night, early toward the dawn. Seifer doesn’t know if he hates her for that or not. If they’re going to break furniture and nearly kill each other,  _ someone  _ ought to be getting paid for it. 

Isn’t that the Garden way, after all? 

He asks her that one night, punctuating it with a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips. She hates the smell, wrinkling her nose as he exhales a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. 

Quistis snorts disdainfully, back to him. He reaches across, runs his fingers along the scars striating her back, knows he’s the root cause of at least three of them. Her skin is clammy, sticky with sweat and exertion. The scent of her is heady on his fingertips when he goes for the cigarette instead a moment later. It’s too much like intimacy, and neither of them have signed up for  _ that  _ shit. 

“If only,” Quistis says.

If her defenses hadn’t dropped earlier, they’re certainly down now. His hand abandons the cigarette, letting it burn down as it will, ash falling onto the tangled sheets, in favor of reaching for her again. 

What is this? What is any of this? 

He wonders, sometimes, why she keeps coming back, why they keep texting each other room numbers, night after night, week after week. What is the  _ point _ , when it’s just going to end in this, angry sex resulting in lethargy in their bones, exhaustion burning up the last of the fire until they sleep hard and repeat the cycle over, over again? 

They use each other up, tear each other down. Soon, there’s going to be nothing left but cigarette butts in a cut-glass ashtray and a couple of hotel room keys. Seifer chucks the half-burned smoke into the ashtray, not bothering to extinguish it. 

His mouth finds the small of her back, the tan line that makes him wonder just  _ what,  _ exactly, Quistis Trepe wears to the beach, because it’s clearly not very much, and the thought of it makes him scorch with not a little bit of possessive envy. He tracks the line of pale skin and its two-shades-darker twin, the soft yield of it beneath his tongue. She shudders, and his fingers dig into her hip. 

“I’m not stopping you from throwing your money away.” He leaves the words in a winding trail up her spine, pushes aside the tangled mass of blonde hair that blocks most of it from his touch. “Lord knows I could use the cash.” 

“Shut up, Seifer.” 

His hand leaves her hip, reaches up, gets a firm handful of her breast. Her breath comes quickly now, for a woman so eager to push him away not five minutes ago. 

They’re going to burn together; he knows this as well as he knows the scars on her back, the way she exhales his name like a curse, a second time so close on the heels of the first that antagonism might as well be their foreplay. 

She hates him. He doesn’t particularly like her. If they’re going to implode, it’ll be  _ together _ . 

“Twenty gil, maybe. If I’m feeling generous.” 

He tugs at her nipple, rolling it between forefinger and thumb. He is not gentle, he is not kind. Seifer Almasy has never been any of those things, and he’s not about to start on her behalf. 

“Fifty.” 

“Twenty-five.” 

The cigarette smolders, wasted. 

“Forty.” His teeth tug at her earlobe, he presses his left hand to her throat, tilting her head back so he can kiss her in a way that makes sense, an angry clash, her lower lip full when he bites it, swollen when he lets it go. She blushes. He likes that-- it makes her eyes  _ bluer _ , all that pink flushing her skin. 

Fuck her, for how much he  _ wants  _ her again-- he should leave, gather his shit and get out, but she rocks her hips back against him, and he’s screwed. 

Is he using her, or is she using him? The world is never going to know. Seifer covers her mouth with his again, lets go of her breast and slips his hand down her stomach, along abs so taut he could eat off of them. Wants to, if he’s being completely honest, pushing her thighs apart. 

“Thirty-five.” 

“Stop talking, Trepe.” 

“You started it.” 

“Yeah, well, I’m ending it.” 

“You can’t run away from all of your problems,” she informs him, and her voice is pitched an octave higher as he gets his hand between her legs, motion ungentle. “It’s not healthy.” 

“Does it look like I’m running?” His hand along her throat, fingers pressing lightly against delicate skin-- six pounds of pressure to the left, and she’ll be playing harps with all the other idiots he’s killed, before the war, during, after. Don’t think he hasn’t thought about it. Seifer settles for tightening his hold a fraction of an ounce further, and her reaction is unexpectedly wet. He chuckles into her ear, wiping his hand off on the silken inside of her thigh. “If I’d known you were into that, I would’ve strangled you a couple weeks ago, saved us all the trouble.” 

She is mortified by what he’s brought her to, lain low to slum with the rest of them. How the  _ mighty  _ Quistis Trepe has fallen, twisting on the bed, shoving him onto his back so hard his head knocks against the wall, to hide her face beneath a veil of hair as she bends herself down to somewhere below his waist. 

He tangles his fingers in that hair, keeps her from choking on it, but he has to admit, her tactic of shutting him up is fucking  _ effective _ . He lets his head fall back, lets the motion of her head and the way her hair feels knotted in his grip occupy the parts of his mind that aren’t currently filled with  _ exactly  _ what she’s doing with that smart mouth of hers. Like she wouldn’t tear him to pieces with hands and mouth alone-- he was  _ there  _ that time she came through the halls of Garden with blood caking her lips and slender neck, something monstrous in her eyes. 

Any sane man wouldn’t trust her. Lucky for the both of them, he isn’t sane anymore, brain snapped in half by a fucking  _ witch _ . 

Bitch.  

(He isn’t sure who he means. The witch in red, the witch in blue, the witch in a black cocktail dress like she’s come back from some fancy  _ function _ , and he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop being surprised by her in  _ civilian  _ clothes, and not that pin-neat uniform of hers, probably buried at the back of her closet.)

“‘S fuckin’  _ cheating _ , you know,” he groans. Like hell he’s going to stop her, though, not when his eyes flutter open and she pierces him with that brilliant blue gaze for just a fraction of a second. He feels like a particularly interesting species of bug pinned beneath glass. 

If anyone is going to kill him, he’d prefer it be her. 

She leaves a hundred gil on the dresser when she slips out of the room hours later, so quietly that even the shutting of the door doesn’t wake him from his sleep, and Seifer can’t even muster up the energy to loathe her for it as he slips out of the hotel sometime way past dawn, and buys himself breakfast at a cafe in town. 

\--

She doesn’t know what she’s doing here. Dollet was a place to go, somewhere to collect her thoughts and her breath, retirement hanging around her shoulders a hard-won mantle-- Garden had  _ begged  _ her to stay, offered her anything. Two years of work after the war, and two years worth of sleepless nights, of panic and power warring in her veins, looking at all those  _ children  _ she was sending off to die. 

And then Xu had gone and gotten herself killed on a particularly dangerous job that both of them knew she would probably not come back from, but it hadn’t stopped her death from leaving a Xu-shaped hole in the world, and something in Quistis had snapped entirely, the last thread holding herself together in the fabric of Garden. 

She’d dropped her retirement paperwork on Squall’s desk, eyes hard, daring him to challenge her. Her dorm had taken little time to pack, boxes on a ship heading across the sea right now to the Dollet port. 

His signature across the bottom page was careless, a spill of ink and letters. 

“Good luck.” The words coming out with an awkward difficulty-- friendship still an awkward, forced thing. “Thank you for your service.” 

_ Thank you for your service _ . Like she was doing an honorable thing, fleeing on a Friday afternoon, where no one would miss her until Monday. She resisted the impulse to salute him, turned, left, picked up her handbag and her whip case from the counter of her dorm, walked out the front gate, down to the train station, and it hadn’t been until she was halfway through the trip, flipping through an abandoned issue of  _ Weapons Monthly,  _ that she realized they had given her access to the SeeD car out of habit, routine. 

At least it was empty. 

Quistis turns up the collar of her jacket against the autumn early-morning breeze, heels clicking against the smooth sidewalk. There’s a trolley station somewhere around here, but a little walking never killed anyone. She pauses at an intersection, orienting herself with the clock tower high up on the crest of the city skyline, and turns left, toward the rushing sound of the sea. The apartment complex is brand new, no history in its walls, no ghosts. Her shoes are killing her feet by the time she gets there; Quistis slips them off while waiting for the elevator to descend ten stories, tucking them into her bag, right next to the gun and the emergency potion she still carries, just in case. 

It’s not even been three months. Habits die hard, ones ingrained into her since she was ten doubly so. 

At least Seifer doesn’t know where she lives. That’s some comfort-- he’s a distraction, a violent, passionate thing that consumes her and spits her out like used-up charcoal. The hotel is convenience; no one cares what you get up to behind closed doors, as long as you’re paying for the privilege. 

There’s a bruise blossoming on her throat when she sheds her coat and catches a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. Quistis runs her fingers along it carefully, drawing up the edge of a cure to eradicate any trace. He’s probably still passed out where she had left him, disentangling herself from the rope of his embrace. 

He looks innocent asleep. Shame he can’t just  _ stay  _ that way when he wakes up, all filth and fury and firestarter-rage. The world is unkind. The world has never been kind, especially not to those that thought they would  _ make  _ something of themselves. 

He has mutated into a monster. She doesn’t know what she is anymore. A failure, a freak. Blue magic humming in her veins, tall and beautiful and blonde. She dumps a pot of water into her coffee maker, fills the basket with two scoops of grounds, presses brew. It burbles to life right on cue-- at least  _ something  _ does what it’s supposed to. 

Quistis strips out of her dress, tossing it in the general direction of the half-full hamper in the bathroom. At least he’s left her underwear intact this time; she may be filthy rich with blood-money, but she doesn’t like having to replace a sixty-gil bra more often than necessary. She stuffs bra and panties into a lingerie bag, the pretense of organization something to ground herself to. 

She brushes her teeth while she waits for the water in her shower to get hot, spits out the taste of Seifer into the sink. Asshole.

The shower is scalding and four minutes long exactly, shampoo in, washed out, body wash lathered, rinsed away. Face scrubbed, soaked clean. She has it down to an art form at this point, wrapping herself in her thick white robe, combing through the tangles in her hair. 

The coffee has long since been ready by the time she finishes, shutting off the bathroom light. She fills the largest mug she has. 

It is something familiar, at least, this breakfast of straight caffeine with no chaser, taken on the open air of her apartment balcony, summer still trying to creep into the edges of the day, the sky warming with the sun’s progress up overhead. It’s going to be ninety degrees by noon, she knows. Dollet doesn’t give up its prime seasons easily, not even two weeks into September. 

At least Time Compression has left her that extra hour of daylight, even after Balamb has gone dark across the water. 

She is free, and still beating at the bars of her cage like a captured dove. 

What is the point of any of it, anymore? 

She drains her cup, gets up to refill it. There are no new messages when she checks her phone. Not that she was expecting any, shutting herself off from everything she knew, new town, new home, new number. There are five people on the planet who have it, and it’s still barely six in the morning her time. 

She has one of Xu’s old sweatshirts in a bottom drawer of her dresser, soft and oversized. Quistis takes her fresh cup of coffee and the morning paper from where it has thudded against her front door into the bedroom. The shirt in question has sleeves so long that Xu had cut thumb holes in the cuffs; they are not so long on Quistis, and she pushes the sleeves up to her elbows, curling up in her bed with her own ghosts and the daily news. 

She wants to go home, but she’s run out of places that fit that definition, hasn’t she? 

Her phone is on the bed next to her; she picks it up, thumbs to her recent messages. He’s still asleep, has to be. Seifer may have a hundred issues but passing out almost directly after sex seems to not be one of them. 

[text]: Make sure you’re out of there before 1100. I don’t want to be charged a late-checkout fee. 

The reply is surprising in its speed. She has barely set the phone down when it beeps at her. 

[text]: Already gone. You left your necklace here, fyi. I was thinking about leaving it for the maid as a tip, but I figured you might want it back.

Her hand touches her throat again. 

[text]: Thank you. I’ll get it from you later. 

[text]: K. 

He’ll probably pawn it before she can get it back. She wouldn’t blame him-- Garden has raised a crop of opportunists and murderers, light-fingered on the corpses of their enemies. She only has herself to blame. 

\--

The diamond is the size of a pea, worth thousands, undoubtedly. Seifer watches it sparkle in the morning sunlight, slender gold chain dangling from rough fingers. He ought to pitch it in the ocean, teach her a lesson about leaving valuable things behind. 

He drops it in his pocket instead, stone and chain chiming against a handful of change. Seifer sticks his phone in the same pocket, and steps out of the cafe, the sun warm against his skin. 

His face turns up to it, he wants to reach for it, to fly. 


End file.
